TY  - JOUR
AU  - Korcsak-Gorzo, Agnes
AU  - Müller, Michael G.
AU  - Baumbach, Andreas
AU  - Leng, Luziwei
AU  - Breitwieser, Oliver J.
AU  - van Albada, Sacha J.
AU  - Senn, Walter
AU  - Meier, Karlheinz
AU  - Legenstein, Robert
AU  - Petrovici, Mihai A.
TI  - Cortical oscillations support sampling-based computations in spiking neural networks
JO  - PLoS Computational Biology
VL  - 18
SN  - 1553-734X
CY  - San Francisco, Calif.
PB  - Public Library of Science
M1  - FZJ-2022-01794
SP  - 3, 1-41
PY  - 2022
AB  - Being permanently confronted with an uncertain world, brains have faced evolutionary pressure to represent this uncertainty in order to respond appropriately. Often, this requires visiting multiple interpretations of the available information or multiple solutions to an encountered problem. This gives rise to the so-called mixing problem: since all of these “valid” states represent powerful attractors, but between themselves can be very dissimilar, switching between such states can be difficult. We propose that cortical oscillations can be effectively used to overcome this challenge. By acting as an effective temperature, background spiking activity modulates exploration. Rhythmic changes induced by cortical oscillations can then be interpreted as a form of simulated tempering. We provide a rigorous mathematical discussion of this link and study some of its phenomenological implications in computer simulations. This identifies a new computational role of cortical oscillations and connects them to various phenomena in the brain, such as sampling-based probabilistic inference, memory replay, multisensory cue combination, and place cell flickering.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:35324886
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000781624200007
DO  - DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009753
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/906981
ER  -